Breaking the Pattern

With a childhood interest in knitting, crochet and embroidery and subsequent training at ESMOD Paris, followed by stints designing for luxury fashion labels, Odély Teboul modernises traditional craftsmanship and Haute Couture techniques through her garments. After working for Jean Paul Gaultier on his prêt-à-porter and Haute Couture collections and co-founding and designing for all-black, luxury label Augustin Teboul for 12 seasons in Berlin, it’s clear that Teboul was ready to break free from the constraints of luxury fashion and apply the techniques she had learnt to something more light-hearted and experimental.

Her latest collection, Eaux-Fortes, for Berlin Fashion Week Autumn Winter 19 is playful yet surprisingly elegant, featuring a mix of luxury and recycled materials: cashmere, plastic, angora and nylon stretch. Using Couture techniques and materials collected during the designer’s personal travels, she uses crumbled knits, embroidered wool and tulle to achieve the delightfully contradictory looks sent down the runway.

The designer sees fashion in an artistic sense, seeing her work as a way of sculpting or painting with needle and thread. Yet she also views fashion as a sociological experiment, with female artists Annette Messager, Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Bourgeois and Marina Abramovic and female writer George Sand (a.k.a. Amantine Dupin) as influences—women who challenged societal restrictions in their time.

And indeed Teboul too captures the current zeitgeist. Exploring the idea of mass consumption and the value of objects and time, she seeks to delve into some of the most topical questions of the day. And, through her designs, to break the pattern of the fashion industry for the future.